Planet Wrecker

-47-

Zero hour struck far too soon for Hawthorne’s comfort. It found him pacing deep in the control center in the Joho Mountains of China Sector.

Before him were banks of screens and their operators. They showed Orion-ship bunkers in the Eurasian heartland.

Hawthorne fixated on Kazakhstan Sector, on Bunker Ninety-Eight. Around the titanic installation were huge ferroconcrete pillboxes. The point-defense cannons in those pillboxes remained idle today. No one had ever envisioned such a situation as this. Instead, every tactician and strategist assigned to the think-tanks had envisioned the Orion-ships having to fight every inch of the way into space against Highborn missiles, lasers and orbitals.

After glancing around the underground control complex, Hawthorne frowned. He felt naked today, exposed. There were banks of screens and operators, with colonels and generals behind them, watching. In the background were hard-eyed men and women, Cone’s security people. They wore black synthi-leather jackets and ear-jacks. Captain Mune and his bionic soldiers were aboard the Orion-ships. It had been a hard decision for Hawthorne. Mune had been with him for so long and had guarded his back so often that now….

Hawthorne knew this was a political risk, and a risk to his personnel security. But the safety of the planet trumped his own. Could Cone’s people guard him as effectively as the bionic men had? The answer was no. The better question was: could Cone’s people do the job and keep him alive?

Above the whispering around him, Hawthorne heard an operator say, “Bunker Ninety-Eight is opening.”

First rubbing his tired eyes, Hawthorne peered at the nearest screen. It showed vast ferroconcrete bays sliding open. Something rose into view from the darkness. He glimpsed the nosecones of various modified attack-craft. Captain Mune was supposed to be in one of those.

“The countdown has begun,” said the operator, a red-eyed woman watching her board. “…Three, two, one, zero—we have ignition.”

Hawthorne shielded his eyes from the first blast before looking. The great Orion-ship rode a huge, roiling cloud of dust and brightly heated plasma into the air. It was a vast space-vessel, with a mammoth blast-shield of ferroconcrete, steel, construction-foam and titanium. Another nuclear bomb squirted out of its exhaust port. There was a second flash, and it forced the Orion-ship higher yet into the atmosphere.

The blast-shield protected the attack-craft parked on the ship’s front. The Orion used nuclear pulse propulsion, with each bomb providing the violent pulse. Nothing humanity had yet devised could lift so much mass, so quickly from Earth.

Hawthorne marveled at the ship. It had been under construction ever since he’d sent the supply fleet to Mars several years ago. If anyone could absorb the punishing liftoff of nuclear bombs, it would be Captain Mune and his men. Glancing at other screens, Hawthorne saw other Orion-ships lifting from their bunkers, seven altogether. These Orion-ships had been part of a two-year-long project to take back near-Earth orbit and possibly capture the Moon. Now the seven giant craft sped toward the stratosphere, smashing their way up out of Earth’s gravity so they could reach the asteroids in the coming weeks. These Orion-ships dwarfed those sent on the Mars mission by two hundred percent.

Watching them, Hawthorne felt a lump in his throat. This could be the last SU Fleet ever launched from Earth. If the soldiers in them failed—extinction! Hawthorne straightened and lifted his arm in a crisp salute. “Good luck, Captain Mune,” he whispered. “I wish you well…friend.”

The bionic soldiers were a secret weapon against the cyborgs. Hawthorne supposed a person could make the point that Mune was a cyborg. Theoretically, it was true. Mune had mechanical parts and graphite bones in his limbs. But his brain was still pure human, or Homo sapien as the Highborn would say.

An immense flash occurred down the line of screens. Men and women there groaned as they stared at a screen, at the terrific explosion shown. One colonel sobbed.

“What happened?” shouted Hawthorne. He expected the worst: that an Orion-ship had malfunctioned. He strode toward that screen, passing operators in their chairs twisting their heads in that direction.

There was more shouting. It came from the shadows, from the security people in their synthi-leather jackets. They seemed to be responding to the flash shown on the screen. Cone’s people drew guns. A woman rapidly spoke into her headset. Other security people clamped a hand over their ear-jacks. Harsh orders tumbled from the security personnel as they ran toward the bank of screens. The security people aimed their guns at everyone. Operators, colonels and generals turned around in surprise at this new development. Then a dozen security people shouted at once for everyone to lie on the floor.

Hawthorne groped for his own sidearm. Was this a coup begun by a surprise flash on a TV screen? Why now and what was its purpose?

“Down, down!” shouted a burly man, motioning with his gun.

“What’s the trouble?” asked Hawthorne, as black-clad security people rushed to him and then spun around, facing outward. “Why have you drawn weapons?” Hawthorne said, grabbing a woman, spinning her around to face him.

“That flash on the screen—” she said, sounding frightened.

Hawthorne recognized then that the security people had overreacted. Mune and his men had never done so. The bionic soldiers had been the best guards a Supreme Commander had ever possessed. In their strength, the bionic men had known clam. He realized that he was dearly going to miss Mune.

“At ease!” shouted Hawthorne. “Lower your guns.”

The security people glanced uneasily at each other. Several glanced at Cone, who hurried into the large chamber as she tucked in her shirt.

“Stand down,” Cone said.

Only then did the security people begin to holster their weapons and back away into the shadows.

Hawthorne felt coldness stab his chest. The security people hadn’t listened to him, but they’d immediately obeyed Cone. She had just become his jailor. Whether the security specialist knew it or not was another matter. He’d have to replace Cone and her people. But with whom? Then he remembered the flash on the screen.

“What happened?” Hawthorne shouted, striding to the offending screen and its operator.

The woman looked up at him ashen-faced, with dark circles around her eyes.

“Speak,” said Hawthorne. On the screen, debris rained down from the clouds as smoke billowed upward.

“Orion-ship Avenger malfunctioned,” the operator whispered. “It exploded. They’re…they’re all dead, sir.”

A colonel on the other side of the operator’s chair was weeping silently, with his face pressed against his hands.

Hawthorne gazed at the screen again, understanding now what he saw. Dead, all those brave bionic soldiers vaporized into atoms. In the hurry and rush to get everything ready for zero hour, somebody had made one mistake too many. Now Earth’s chance for survival had dropped…by however many percentage points that ship represented.

Hawthorne rubbed his eyes. There were so many things to coordinate, to think about, it was breaking him down. It was breaking all of them.

“I wish I’d filled the Avenger with Highborn,” he said.

Several operators turned and stared at him in shock. One general nodded, however, and even managed a bleak grin.

“Carry on,” said Hawthorne. “We can’t stop for anyone now, not even for those brave soldiers.”

The heavy Orion-ships on screen continued to flash and zoom upward, already leaving the atmosphere as they entered outer space and near-Earth orbit.